Newton Poetry

Got a fun e-mail from Oklahoma:

Just came from your Newton Poetry site and saw your remarks about the Molar Mac. I have one that I would like to sell. I’m moving and as you mentioned this beautiful Mac weighs about 60 lbs. I LOVE this Mac. Mine is a 233 MGH and it has two SCB ports, so I was able to use a flash drive with it. Also has a working floppy drive and a non-working zip drive. Otherwise, it is in great condition and works great. I do not think it was ever used in a school. I got it from a graphic designer. It’s loaded with Photoshop, Illustrator and Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. Do you know anyone who would like to buy a great Molar Mac and who would be willing to pay the shipping cost to receive it???

Thanks,
Marilyn in Tulsa

If anyone’s interested in owning a great piece of recent Mac history, drop me an e-mail and I’ll give you Marilyn’s contact info.

A while back, I asked, “How many Macs are too many?” I asked this after realizing that I have, at this time, three working Macs surrounding my Nerve Center here at home.

Newton Poetry reader Rand Careaga chimed in with his impressive suite of Macs, including the above beauty: an all-in-one G3 PowerMac, also known as the Molar Mac.

Like the eMac after it, the Molar Mac was designed for the education market, where the look-ma-no-mess-of-wires design was attractive. And hence the name: the thing looked like a giant tooth.

A giant heavy tooth: they were almost 60 lbs. heavy, and that’s only with a 15″ CRT screen. As the Washington Apple Pi Journal puts it in their hilarious (and comprehensive) post:

While it is possible for a single large, stupid person to uncrate one (or even six) of these without assistance, Don’t Do This. The machines are heavy, and the boxes are deep. You can fall into a box and never be heard from again. You can rupture vital organs of a personal nature. Accept the fact that this is a two-person task.

The All-In-One G3 came before the iMac, meaning no USB ports. It did come with serial and ADB ports for peripherals, as well as a floppy disk drive.

Molar Macs came in two speeds, 233 MHz PowerPC and 266 Mhz, meaning they run at the same clockspeed as the original iMacs, and shipped with 32 MB of RAM. For their time, these were speedy machines. And speedy to set up, too, thanks to their all-in-one design.

Sadly, I’ve never seen one in person. Any Molar Mac owners out there that can speak to their uniqueness?